Hawker House, within St Mark's College, North Adelaide, linked to key South Australian families from 1880s
Hawker House, named after Charles Hawker, became an imposing part of Pennington Terrace, North Adelaide, within the campus of St Mark's university residential college. Its history, from the 1880s, was linked to a series of prominent South Australian families.
Hawker House on Pennington Terrace, North Adelaide, named in the 20th Century by St Mark’s College after a founder and Australian prime ministerial contender Charles Hawker, also had links to other prominent 19th Century South Australians.
The building was the home from the early 1880s for Arthur Waterhouse, son of the financier Thomas Waterhouse. Arthur Waterhouse also promoted his own commercial enterprises and he had the grand St Margarets in Brougham Place, North Adelaide, built to be his later home in the 1890s.
Waterhouse bought his Pennington Terrace property in 1882 for a building considered to be architecturally significant. As with St Margarets, the architect was possibly George Klewitz Soward. Soward was responsible for many grand Adelaide houses including St Corantyn on East Terrace, Adelaide city; and Dundrennan at Glenelg. He remained in the architectural practice of English and Soward (and later Jackman) until at least 1930.
Hawker House-to-be drew on various influences with its robust asymmetry, complex roof form, bold joinery, and substantial use of sandstone masonry. It had a more historically accurate Italianate composition from the early 19th Century than the ubiquitous villas claiming that style.
Waterhouse sold the house in 1888 to Alfred Simms, prominent brewer, who helped found the South Australian Brewing Company. The house was leased briefly by the prominent merchant Malcolm Reid and then bought in 1912 by Eran Kyffin Thomas of the South Australian Register newspaper family. Robert Thomas, the notable South Australian architect, was Eran Kyffin Thomas' uncle.
The property was owned by Mary Harriet Archer Thomas until it was sold to the South Australian government in 1955. It was being used to house the education department’s correspondence school when it was taken over in 1970 by the Anglican university students residential St Mark’s College.
The college was able to buy the building with a gift and bequest by Lilias Needham (nee Hawker) to perpetuate the memory of her brother Charles Allan Seymour Hawker. Hawker, a highly-regarded South Australian federal member of parliament, widely considered a possible prime minister, was killed in the Kyeema air crash in Victoria in 1938. Hawker also was a founder and benefactor of St Mark’s College, from 1925.
